Addicts: Black Meddle, Part II

Century Media; 2010

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As the leader of the biggest and most important band in American black metal, Nachtmystium frontman Blake Judd is a product of a very insular and misanthropic scene. That goes a long way toward explaining an old association with a white-power record distributor that Judd, indefensibly, still refuses to disavow. But it also illustrates how far this guy has come since his frothing-demon early days. Judd did just fine for himself when he stuck with straight-up black metal; Nachtmystium's great 2006 album Instinct: Decay makes a hell of an argument for how far unadulterated black metal can go without really testing its genre parameters. But with 2008's Assassins: Black Meddle, Part I, Judd made a conscious decision to push past the scene that birthed him-- a decision he takes even further on the band's new joint.

Addicts, while remaining heavy as all fuck, isn't a black metal album in any real way. Instead, it finds Nachtmystium at a place that reminds me of Into the Pandemonium-era Celtic Frost, or Roots-era Sepultura-- monstrously vicious bands that widened their scope by attempting to fuse sounds and grammars from disparate genres into their general maelstrom. And like those two bands, Nachtmystium can get messy or maybe even hokey at times, but they end up with a final product that towers above anything around it.

There's a nice bait-and-switch at the outset of the album. "High on Hate", the first proper song, starts as something recognizably black metal. There's a little more melody in the vocal than you'd hear in, say, anything in the Emperor discography, but you still get berserk double-bass and swarming-insect guitars, and it shows just how much bile Judd can display when he stays within his old comfort zone. But 2:20 in, a righteous pick slide signals a total change in tone, as a slow, deliberate, fiery stoner groove kicks in, and the song ends in a triumphant guitar solo not too far removed from, like, Slash. From there, things branch out further. Judd has referred to "No Funeral" as "black metal disco," and while that might be overstating things a bit, the song's retro synth vwerps do exist somewhere on the Tangerine Dream/Giorgio Moroder axis. The bass-thuds and cheesed-out backing vocals on "Nightfall" recall Queens of the Stone Age. Closer "Every Last Drop" brings in vaguely Tuvan wordless moans from Yakuza's Bruce Lamont, as well as acoustic guitars, electronic pulses, and shoegaze-level guitar fuzz, then lets all those ingredients percolate for eight and a half zoned-out minutes.

The whole thing sounds incredible, especially compared to the band's tape-hissy older work. Sanford Parker, the best producer in metal this side of Kurt Ballou, records everything with just enough polish and just enough grime-- letting you feel every riff in your gut without cleaning the sound up so much that it squanders the music's primal mystery. At times, you can even hear fingers squeak on acoustic guitar strings. But expert production isn't always Nachtmystium's friend. Certain lyrics, for instance, become a lot sillier when you can actually make them out ("I am the wizard!/ I live in hell, you know!/ You will never see me!/ But I exist below!"). And a few of the ideas, like the almost-reggae synth sound in the background on "The End Is Eternal", don't really work.

Overall, though, Addicts stands as a landmark work for this band, both in its omnivorous restlessness and its crushing, monolithic heaviness. It's a deeply immersive record, one that can swallow up your whole world if you hear it on headphones in the right mood. And it becomes even more impressive when you learn that Judd wrote it as an album about overcoming struggles, rather than luxuriating and reveling in directionless hate, the way so much black metal is perfectly content to do. "I always knew there was nothing standing in my way," he roars on "Then Fires", and he's right. The further out this guy pushes his ideas, the better his music gets-- which means Addicts might be Nachtmystium's best album yet.